by K. Gorman
She darted back down the hall just as Soo-jin’s call connected. Nick’s face appeared on the screen.
They didn’t even have to say anything. The door panel flashed green next to the hatch. They piled inside, hurrying to close it behind them.
Nick greeted them on the other side, then engaged the lock.
The Ozark had several places it could have attached to Caishen with, and this was the least welcoming. A cramped, narrow corridor with even less cause for aesthetics than the rest of the ship, Karin recognized it as one of the vessel’s emergency exits.
“Thank fucking Sol,” Soo-jin started. “What the hells is—”
“Shh.” Nick cut her off with a quick gesture. “Catch up later. We have to hide. People are looking for you.”
“And you’re on our side?”
“Yes. So’s Christops, but Hopper’s on his ass.” He led them down the hall, paused at the end to look around the corner, then gestured for them to follow. “Come on. We have to be quick.”
A sound at the hatch behind her made her pause. The ball. Hand shaking, she released her light puppet. Emptiness scraped at her insides when the light didn’t return, but she swallowed it back and followed the other two.
After living aboard for almost a week, the Ozark’s long, metal halls felt familiar. With only twenty-one crew, at least half of which were lying in the berthing corridor on Caishen, they walked through empty hall after empty hall. It didn’t feel like the ghost ship it had been when she had first walked through it, back when they’d just been finding out about the Lost, but the silence bred a steadily growing panic that rose through her bones and stiffened her neck.
And that last puppet had taken her strength. As they climbed the stairs into the Ozark’s lesser-used sections, her earlier nausea returned. A weak, fluttering sensation pulled at her muscles. She had to fight against a lightness that moved back into her brain.
After one particular staircase, a rush of dizziness threw her off. She sucked in a ragged breath and sagged against the railing, flattening her palm against the wall.
“Karin?” Soo-jin glanced back. “Are you okay?”
She tried to form an answer, but the nausea rolled through her guts instead. She swallowed it back, tasting the burn of acid at the back of her throat. She dragged another breath through her nose and held it, tensing her fingers against the wall as she fought with her stomach.
But the second wave was too much.
She heaved, doubling over. Hands caught her as she stumbled dangerously close to the stairs, and Soo-jin pulled her hair back.
Her nose burned. She coughed and tried to swallow, but her throat closed up.
In the end, she spat out more onto the floor.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Once one had thrown up in front of strangers, there wasn’t a whole lot more disgusting things you could do.
“Well, the good news is, there’s no blood,” Soo-jin commented. “Just peanuts.”
Great. She was looking at her vomit. Karin coughed again, and Soo-jin patted her shoulder.
“Come on, sit over here. I’ll help you.”
“I can carry her, if you like?” Nick said. “Would that help?”
“What would help is a package of water, which I have. You can help by telling us what’s been happening while we’ve been incarcerated. Was there some sort of conspiracy to give us up?”
“Yeah. Charise and James both used to work for the government. Had a few run-ins, which is why they left, but they’re Alliance loyalists.”
“And Christops is not?”
“He’s with you guys, but stuck on the bridge. Keeping Hopper occupied. As for the rest…” Nick shrugged. “We don’t really know what’s going on, or what your plan is.”
Karin cleared her throat, but, before she could speak, Soo-jin thrust a water package into her face, straw already inserted.
“Our original plan was to have Marc pull into your aft hangar and take some fuel rods with us. That still valid?”
Nick’s head tilted. “Could be. Fuel rods are already secured in there. We’d just have to open the air door.”
“Good, good,” Soo-jin said. “We can work with that. Heard anything from Marc?”
“He’s about an hour out now. Already called. We told him what happened.”
“Well, get on your netlink and start updating people. Let’s see if we can make this show work.”
Karin cleared her throat. “What about the Fallon ship? Any ID on them?”
“No. Came in range after we docked. It’s huge, though. Some kind of warship.”
Despite herself, her jaw slackened. A warship? What the hell?
“Can the Ozark do a scan?”
“No, she’s too old. Christops has the comms open, though I’m not sure they’d bother contacting us.”
She swallowed another gulp of water. “If Hopper’s shunning them, we might be the only ones left.”
“Yeah, us and whoever sent those balls.” Soo-jin snorted. “I imagine its large, battle-fleet set of weaponry makes it hard to shun. How far out?”
“They’ll get here in forty-five at their current speed.”
She and Soo-jin exchanged a look. Forty-five minutes. Right about the time Marc was scheduled to arrive.
“Things just keep getting better, don’t they?” Soo-jin leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “Sol. Anything else we need to know about?”
“Hopper’s got override codes for the Ozark’s doors, and some of his people are on board.”
“Excellent. My day wouldn’t be complete without shooting more assholes.” Soo-jin glanced to Nick. “Self defense. Long story.”
He raised his hands. “Oh, don’t worry. I am not judging.”
“Good, because I plan to put a few more of them in Med before this cycle is over.” She looked down. “Karin? How you doing?”
She swallowed another mouthful of water. The burning had lessened, at least. Same with the dizziness—for now, at least. “I think I can move again. Just overworked myself. Maybe…”
She frowned, glancing at her fingers. She didn’t feel as empty and strained as she had before, when she’d thrown up while healing the Lost, but the light puppet earlier had definitely sent her over the edge. “I think I should lay off the magical powers for a bit.”
Soo-jin gave her an assessing look, her brow furrowing. They had no idea how she could do what she did. No idea what series of lab experiments and serums had yielded her result. Even when she’d been going through the program, the treatments had gone largely unexplained—glossed over as a normal part of their life.
Normal kids went to the dentist every year. She and her sister got gene-specific lab treatments.
If her powers went away, they would have no defense against the Shadows. No cure.
“Well, let’s try and take it easy. I’ll shoot any Shadows that come our way. Now—” she turned to Nick. “Where’s the closest comms station? I have some scheming to do.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Karin perched on the bare metal edge of a stripped bunk. They’d snuck into one of the Ozark’s higher levels, closing doors and switching off lights as they went, and found a local comms terminal in one of the empty suites. A place of relative luxury, meant for the colony transport’s first cryogenic passengers, the wide, double-bedded room must have cost a pretty penny compared to the lower decks’ cramped, four to six-bed shared dorms. They would have woken up in here, drugged out of stasis by shipboard systems once they’d reached the proper location point in their journey.
Intrepid colonists, ready for a new life.
She patted the metal. That hadn’t been quite so long ago. The first colony ship had left Earth over a thousand years ago. The last, only thirty.
The Sirius system might have abandoned its gate, but the Sol system hadn’t given up. When she and Nomiki had left, the Gliese gate still had its pieces coming together. The Centauri gate, locked in geosynced orbit with Earth, saw plenty of traffic t
hrough its Einstein-Rosin-Lin field.
Soo-jin sat at the comms terminal embedded into the desk across the room. The blue glow lit across the smooth skin of her forearms and limned the rough edges of her dreads. By the way she hunched, she had found something worth scheming.
Hacking the Ozark had been easy—especially for the ship’s engineer. As he had explained it, security protocols were so outdated and minimal on the Ozark that it had been easier to hack into its mainframe and reorganize the system to fit his own computer terminal rather than navigate through the vintage code each time. He also had access to the security system. Over Soo-jin’s shoulder, she caught glimpses of video feed as Soo-jin scrolled through the active cameras. Nick leaned over from the side, occasionally typing in commands.
“Shut the G-section-51 door on them,” Soo-jin told him.
“We are nowhere near G-sec-51.”
“Precisely.”
Nick squinted. He leaned forward, the light turning his face and clothes into a wash of blue glow, making the shadows on his back compact and stretch.
As he entered in the command, Karin found her attention wandering. A long, narrow window lined the suite, probably the most expensive addition. A foot wide, it put a bar of open space at her eye level, complemented by the tilting steel planes of the Ozark’s outer hull.
Sitting at an angle to Caishen, she only caught a small glimpse of the ship docked into the next port. A mining ship. She hadn’t seen any miners in Caishen yet, so she assumed they had either stayed on ship, abandoned it for a ride to Enlil, or—and this seemed more likely—were holed up among Caishen’s Lost, on a lesser priority to the ones she’d already healed for Hopper.
Soo-jin had given her a shot from a medkit they’d found. She felt it working away, some combination of painkiller and stimulant, turning the light-headedness around her head like soft water. The aches in her bones had vanished, but the dizziness had yet to subside.
As Soo-jin and Nick schemed, she shifted closer to the window. Beyond those docked, no ships came into view. Wherever the Fallon ship was—and it should be visible by now—she couldn’t see it.
And Marc…
Unlike a Fallon warship, the Nemina would be too small to see at this distance, but that didn’t stop Karin from looking. Her hard burn put her less than thirty minutes out now.
If this plan of theirs were to work, they had to get moving.
Across the room, Soo-jin seemed to be having similar thoughts. She’d sat back in her chair, brow furrowed and eyes narrowed in concentration as she turned to Nick. “Any good ways to get down to the hangar?”
“Yes, but they’ll expect us.”
“We need a distraction, then.” Soo-jin chewed her lip, thinking.
“Any idea where those balls went?” Karin suggested. “Any on ship?”
Nick opened his mouth, but before he could answer, the comms terminal beeped. They all jumped.
“It’s the bridge,” he said, scanning the message. He glanced to Soo-jin. “Might want to get out of camera view.”
Soo-jin slid out of the chair and off to the side, hands going to her hips. A second later, Nick sat in her place and accepted the call.
Christops’ face, looking as exhausted and overworked as the rest of them felt, replaced the code and schematics that had filled the other parts of the screen. A low buzz of activity from his side of the call created a background static.
“Do I want to know what you’re doing?” he asked Nick.
“Probably not.”
“They’re safe?” Nick didn’t answer, but his expression must have said something because Christops relaxed. “I’ve relayed your message,” he continued. “She’ll be in soon. Twenty-eight minutes.”
Nick nodded. “Anything from Caishen?”
“Yeah. Hopper’s been calling.” On the screen, Christops’ expression tightened. “We picked up our people from outside. Marsa’s looking after them in sick bay.”
At her angle, she saw Nick’s back go rigid.
“Will they—”
“Two dead,” Christops continued. “Finn and Charise.”
A stiffness went through Karin’s jaw. She may not have been the woman’s biggest fan, but she felt her death all the same.
And it was, in a large part, her fault.
If she hadn’t been here… If she hadn’t come…
No. She couldn’t think like that.
Silence rose from the other side of the room. To the left, out of sight of the camera, Soo-jin’s front was outlined in blue, arms crossed over her chest, mouth fixed in a tight, downward line. Nick’s shoulders rose up in what seemed to be an unconscious, instinctual reaction, then dipped back down again, relaxing.
“Sol,” he said.
“One of those balls got on board,” Christops said. “Not sure how, but we caught it on one of the cameras. Sara’s tracking it. Saw it on C-deck about five minutes ago.”
C-deck. Just below where they sat. She stiffened, and exchanged a look with Soo-jin.
They had to get going.
“We’re going to need a distraction. I assume they know about the hangar plan?”
“They do. Charise told him before. Do whatever you have to do. I’ll make sure things go smoothly on this end.” He gave the screen a tight smile. “Fuel rods are still where you put them. Sara’s got a discreet camera on them.”
“Thanks.”
“I have to go now. I’m sure I’m about to receive another call. Good luck.”
“You, too,” Nick said.
The feed cut.
“How far is the closest deck access?” Soo-jin asked.
“There’s a stairwell two hallways down.” Nick lifted his head. “Why? That ball thing? You think it’ll come after us?”
“Two of those things tracked me across three kilometers without seeing,” Karin said. “And they kept finding me on the station.”
“That they’re even here is a pretty good reason to suspect them.” Soo-jin tapped her fingers on the outside of her elbow, then turned her head toward Nick. “You got any noisemakers or anything? Small bombs?”
“Bombs?” He frowned. “Some mining equipment—but nothing that’ll work on a ship without disabling it.” He swiveled his chair around, the furrow in his brow deepening. “Ronnie’s got some firecrackers.”
“What, like for festivals?”
“Yeah. Picked them up on Belenus, last time through.”
Soo-jin’s expression pinched together.
“Those… will have to do. Let’s swing by and pick them up.” She glanced over. “Karin, how are you feeling? Good to go?”
“Yeah.” She flexed her fingers. They shook less now and, although the dizziness hadn’t left her head, it felt more distant at present. In fact, a lot of things felt more distant. “I think I’m high.”
“That’ll wear off. But let’s get going while you’re still feeling spry. If we’re lucky, the boost will last until we get on the Nemina.”
“A bit ambitious, at this point,” she commented.
“Yeah, well, I’m trying for a bright face in this. Part of self-affirmation and all that.” Soo-jin flashed her a grin. “We’ll be fine, this plan will work, and you are going to fly us out from under the nose of Caishen, an Alliance cruiser, and a Fallon warship, both of which I assume will be on our tails.”
Karin wrinkled her nose. “You think Fallon’s after us?”
“My optimism only runs so deep. After all that’s happened, I’m just going to assume yes at this point.” Soo-jin turned her shrug into a stretch and stifled a yawn. “Shall we?”
With the chemical rush from the shot firing through her veins, the lengthy walk through the Ozark’s corridors blended together. She didn’t feel a thing apart from a flush of heat on her skin and the airy, hollow sensation at the top of her head. They branched off from the main hallways, taking shortcuts down access routes and, twice, ducking into a cabin to hide while people walked by.
After ten minutes, Nick left
them on one level to duck down into the Ozark’s row of crew cabins. When he came back, three strings of firecrackers hung from his hand. Soo-jin emptied out one of the packs and held it up. He took it, easing the crackers inside.
Karin had seen them before. An archaic invention from Old Earth, they came out during religious festivals around the planets. Gunpowder, rather than the more modern noisemakers found in the Core planets today. She’d seen them twice since she’d left Earth, once in the spaceport she and Nomiki had used to make their escape, and the last on Laksmi space station between Tala and Belenus.
They stopped again when they reached a stairwell past a long hallway. Soo-jin turned to Nick. “You got a netlink?”
He flicked it out of his pocket and showed it to her.
“Good. See if you can ask Christops what the camera station outside the hangar looks like.”
Karin switched her gaze to the door, only now recognizing the code. Her internal map of the Ozark righted itself. The hangar door sat around the corner of the next hallway. Probably right on the other side of the wall from them. She’d seen it in the schematics before, but not in person. Built for loading cargo—or, in its original capacity, cryogenically frozen people—it had space for three Nemina-sized ships to land, though the third might find the parking a bit tricky.
She leaned forward, sneaking a glance at the netlink screen as Nick made a call.
18:25. Less than twenty minutes before Marc showed up.
The call cut off with a disheartened bloop, but a text screen flashed up in its place. Nick poked at the holokeys, writing a message.
About a minute later, they all frowned down at the image Christops sent.
Soo-jin blew a noisy breath, almost a hiss, through her teeth. “It was too much to hope that it’d be empty, wasn’t it?”
Five guards stood outside the hangar’s double doors, each armed with a kind of blaster rifle she’d only seen planet-side. A spike of fear threaded through her nerves, but her brain pieced the logic together.
The rifles were for the balls, not them.